I had that thing that would create so much heat and noise, i had to get rid of it before going crazy.
I think it was called. . I got it: cray

 

Atari 1040 STE

 

Australian made - Microbee. A Zilog Z80 CPU (1~2 MHz ?), 16Kb RAM, 512*256 monochrome display.
Was good for learning to program either BASIC or Z80 Editor/Assembler machine code.

Build a simple 8-bit DAC for the printer port and wrote simple VA synthesis voices.

 

10 If A$ = 'yes' goto 20

 

An Oric-1 (circa 1981)




A nice/awful little machine (about £100 at the time - a lot!)




I don't suppose it really counts, but before the Oric I had this:




And at that time my drum kit looked like this:

 

First one I had: Franklin Ace 1000 (Apple ][+ clone)
Second: Amiga 2500
These were both a real tease, because my parents bought them. They had this middle-class poser attitude that I should grow up with computers, yet they were terrified of me cutting loose with networking or useful software, so I just had some games.
First useful computer I had that I did anything with: Advantech 5862 Biscuit Board SBC

Second useful computer that I did most work in the late 90s with: Apple Power Macintosh 8500
Oldest computer I've ever had: Intel MCS-85

Oldest computers I actually do anything with now:
Apple Macintosh SE (modified)
Atari Falcon030

 

Oric? That reminds me of someone. I wonder if they were related...

 

For me everything started with a Sinclair ZX81, one of the cheapest computer at the time.

Then I moved on to the Commodore 64 which I believe is still an amazing computer. The thing is that software is still released today for the c64 which is kind of awesome when you consider that this machine is almost 40 years old.

 

started with Atari 800XL and in 1984 upgraded to Atari 520ST for its MIDI capability. Turned it into 1040 by soldering RAM chips onto the existing ones.

 

My first attempts in the audio world
looked like this:



Hot-Recording my nasty drumsolos to my parents tape recorder had huge sonic impact on saturation, pretty much my first distortion plugin that was.

I used to make „my own versions“ of songs in the radio thru adding „audio effects“ thru a method called pause taping.



Lateron , mid-late 80s, i played Chris Huelsbecks game „to be on top“ at a friends on a
Commodore C64. In that game you are an ambitioned synthesizer musician trying „to make it in the music biz „



Around that time i saw that movie „Ferris Buellers Day Off“, and the protagonist had this amazing machine which i know instantly i need to have (edit: E-Mu Emulator II for sure i never owned)



Shortly afterwards the guy with the c-64 had this little gem, we played around with steadily



Few years later, i was the proud owner of an Commodore Amiga 500 upgraded ram to 1 mb, with external floppy drive (remember x-copy?).
My first DAW looked like this (Soundtracker, later i updated to Octalyzer which had 8 simultaneous tracks splitting left & right channel plus i bought a sample module for 100 bucks to sample into amiga via chinch caple.



Few years later i bought a used Atari St 1040 with Cubase, that disk never left the floppy drive for some reason, triggered my Korg-Poly 800 / Roland W-30 / Roland Juno 106 with.
Work space looked like this



Kind of crazy what an evolution the whole DAW thing went thru, happy to be here in 2019, im into it for about more or less 30 years, never had that much opportunities & fun playing around in an audio environment!

 

Last edited: Feb 21, 2019

Hold on, you owned an E-MU II?

 

I remember the first time I heard about Cubase, I was like "wow, a sequencer in a computer: the future is now"

 

You serious? Definitely not, but it was the dream machine at that point in time, first sampler i saw and instantly fall in love with sampling

 

MSX then Apple II

Thery were merely game machines.

View attachment 14418

 

C64 + TAC-2

 

This one (still have it), later Atari STE

 

Last edited: Feb 21, 2019

I literally started with the same that @Baxter's photo , including those joysticks that were pure iron. When I was frustrated gaming and hit the desktop with them I'd get cramps all over my hand and arm

Hell yeah and to you too old fuck fella
I remember that one of the decisive factors to ask my parents to buy me the C64 (over the Sinclair, Amstrad, MSX) was a demo of the "The way of the exploding fist" in the shop we went to, a karate game with sampled sounds! Yeah, the SID sound chip. Legendary.

So true, I followed the C64 with a Commodore Amiga 500. Just incredible that computer.

Competitor of the Amiga with the first MIDI port in a personal computer. AFAIK.

 

i love this thread , cheers to @The Pirate , impressive what you did to even out the adverse circumstances!

Dont wanna go off topic, is there a thread about classic computer games? Cheers @Xupito for mentioning exploding fist!

 

First one...

 

C 64 then Amiga 500 (the very first month this wonderful machine was on the stores)